Determining a receiver's ability to receive signals is an important post-manufacturing testing procedure. Measuring the sensitivity of a receiver such as a receiver within a selective call device, or pager, has historically been time consuming. Some prior art methods use a probeless environment simulating an RF field while measuring the selective call receiver's boolean response: an alert tone or no alert tone. Measuring the RF sensitivity of a selective call device by measuring its boolean response requires multiple, time-consuming paging attempts. Measurement accuracy is a function of the number of paging attempts; therefore, high accuracy disadvantageously requires a large number of paging attempts.
Measuring a Bit Error Rate (BER) is another prior art method to determine a selective call device's ability to receive signals. BER testing reduces measurement time and increases repeatability capability over measuring a boolean response. Disadvantageously, prior art methods typically add costly hardware and algorithms to a device under test to enable BER testing. BER testing requires a test controller that generates a multi-bit digital pattern and controls a radio frequency transmitter, and that subsequently receives from the selective call device, usually via wireline, a multi-bit digital pattern decoded by the selective call device. Disadvantageously, the wireline affects the ability of the selective call device to receive a page. The test controller then calculates a BER and stores the result. However, the implementation of BER testing for wireless one-way communication devices with built in antennas needs to be accomplished without probing the device under test, as it could affect the measurement. The main problem to overcome with this constraint is enabling a communication path from the device under test back to the test controller.
Thus what is needed is a selective call device that itself determines a BER of a received signal without using external apparatus and which conveys the BER to the test controller in a manner that does not affect the BER measurement.